Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those “liberals” who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.

Life | Life | People | Wrong |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

Life | Life |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

Freedom | Greed | Price | Self-love | Words |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

But it wasnÂ’t until I was well into my twenties and had Jewish friends that I heard about guilt.

Business | Challenge | Business |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Mardonius was more fond of me than I was of him. That always gives one an advantage.

Literature | Virtue | Virtue | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

TodayÂ’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they canÂ’t read them either.

Life | Life | Words |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The African is here and to stay. How came he to our shores? Ask your grandfathers, Mr. Anonymous, and if they will tell the truth you will or should blush for the crimes.

Labor | Mission | Power | Public | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.

World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The behavior of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

Good | Little | Past | Present | Thought | World | Thought |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow.

Good | Human race | People | Race | Regard | Religion | System | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.

Objectivity | Opinion | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.

Balance | Life | Life | Nothing | Reason |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.

Important | Life | Life | Object | World |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

As a rule hogs are only raised where they have good health and grow fat. Any old place will do to raise human beings.

Capitalism | Cause | Destroy | Duty | Good | Power | Time | Traitor | Treason | World | Worry |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

What the workingmen of the country are profoundly interested in is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, the enslaving and degrading wage-system in which they toil for a pittance at the pleasure of their masters and are bludgeoned, jailed or shot when they protest — this is the central, controlling, vital issue of the hour, and neither of the old party platforms has a word or even a hint about it. As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class.

Age | Awakening | Conquest | Duty | Glory | History | Nothing | Object | Reason | War | Wealth | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.

Fate | Life | Life | Fate |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

If we succeed in cleaning up the environment, we donÂ’t have enough money for war. But Americans are basically pro-war. WeÂ’re a violent people and we like it.

Enough | Life | Life |